Just yesterday I thought about the right middle ground for KYC when buying guns.
The issue with centrally registering guns is than when you country is taken over by hostile forces (whether an invading army or a democratically elected abuser who turns it into a dictatorship), they know who has the guns and can force those people to surrender them (politely at first, authoritarians always use a salami slicing technique).
The issue with no controls is that even anti-social and mentally ill people can get them.
I wonder if the right middle ground could be:
- Sellers have to do their due diligence - require ID, proof of psychological examination, whatever else is deemed the right balance.
- Not doing due diligence means they get punishment equal to that for any offense committed with that gun.
- They might be required to mark/stamp the gun so that it can be traced back to them or have witnesses for the transfer.
The arguments for background checks generally have to be split into two separate classes of people.
The first is the mentally ill. Intuitively it seems desirable to say that someone undergoing treatment for e.g. depression shouldn't buy a gun. The problem here is the massive perverse incentive. If you're pretty depressed but you're not inclined to forfeit your ability to buy firearms, you now have a significant incentive to avoid seeking treatment. At which point you can still buy a gun but now your mental illness is going untreated, which is very worse than where we started.
The second is career criminals, i.e. people who have already been convicted of a crime and want to commit another one. The problem here is that career criminals... don't follow laws. If they want a gun they steal one or recruit someone without a criminal record into their gang etc., both of which are actually worse than just letting them buy one.
On top of that, when people get caught, prosecutors generally try to get them to testify against other criminals in exchange for a deal, who are then going to be pretty mad at them. Which gives them a much higher than average legitimate need to exercise their right to self-defense once they get back out. And then you get three independent bad outcomes: If they can't defend themselves they get killed for snitching, if they acquire a gun anyway so they don't then they could go back to prison even if they were otherwise trying to reform themselves, and if they think about this ahead of time or are advised of it by their lawyers then they'll be less likely to cooperate with prosecutors because the other two scenarios that are both bad for them only happen if they snitch.
Meanwhile the proposal was only ever expected to address a minority of the problem to begin with because plenty of the people who do bad things can pass the background check. And if you have a policy that doesn't even solve most of the original problem while creating several new ones, maybe it's just a bad idea?
> And if you have a policy that doesn't even solve most of the original problem while creating several new ones, maybe it's just a bad idea?
Are you saying everyone should be allowed to have a gun?
Because that's genuinely an interesting position. My proposal came from the view that if we need gun control, we should make sure it cannot be abused into a self reinforcing loop where a completely disarmed population is the end state (and possible end goal).
I would be interested if there is research into these indirect effects you talk about. For example I'd like to know how often people actually snitch, whether there are attempts/procedures to protect info about who snitched, how often they are killed for snitching, how often having a gun helps them, etc. E.g. because if a hit can come at any time from anywhere, having a gun might only give a feeling of safety.
> Are you saying everyone should be allowed to have a gun?
We can probably make an exception for people who are currently in prison.
> I would be interested if there is research into these indirect effects you talk about.
This is a political question so all of the research is performed by partisans for one side or the other. On top of that, most of this stuff is inherently hard to measure, e.g.:
> For example I'd like to know how often people actually snitch, whether there are attempts/procedures to protect info about who snitched, how often they are killed for snitching, how often having a gun helps them, etc.
The government is going to try to avoid disclosing who snitches and the criminals are going to try to find out and retaliate. But if the criminals have a way of finding out (e.g. bribe the cops) then it will be illegal and no one will want to admit it's happening, and likewise if they successfully retaliate they'll want to do it a way that doesn't catch them a murder conviction.
So now someone few people are going to notice winds up dead. If they were an informant at some point in the past, those records are closely guarded for obvious reasons, so how is someone trying to collect statistics even supposed to know that? Likewise, if their death is made to look like an accident or the killer is never caught, how do you know how often it was actually an accident or an unrelated crime?
Which then leads into this:
> E.g. because if a hit can come at any time from anywhere, having a gun might only give a feeling of safety.
Part of the premise of having a weapon is as a deterrent, which gives you another measurement problem: If a lot of the snitches are keeping weapons even though they're not allowed to and that's successfully deterring anyone from trying to kill them, neither the snitches nor their hitmen are going to admit to either one because they're both breaking the law.
The lack of anybody having good numbers also feeds into the problem itself, because then the snitches have to guess whether it will help them and a lot of them are going to regard the risk of getting killed as a bigger threat than the risk of getting caught with a gun. Or worse, the hitmen will like their chances better when the law requires their target to be unarmed. And both of those happen stochastically as a result of the inherent uncertainty regardless of your own guess for how effective the victim having a weapon is at deterring retaliation.
Third, non career violent people. Domestic violence or other interpersonal viole ce should prevent you from having a gun. Regardless of whether you are career criminal
That isn't a third category, those are people who have been convicted of a crime and want to commit another one. It's the same general category of not being able to solve people committing crimes by making already-illegal things even more illegal. And on top of that you get to add two new problems.
The first is the deterrent to reporting, both before and after a conviction. In the original case the victim now can't even report a domestic misdemeanor in the subculture where gun ownership is sacrosanct because either they themselves consider "permanently can't own a gun" too severe a penalty for the crime they were trying to report, or they know the perpetrator will and they're afraid of being booted out into the street or worse if they do it. And for someone who already has a conviction but still has a gun, now the other people in the household can't be calling the police for any reason because if the police find the gun the person keeping a roof over their head is going to prison for years. In general you want the penalties for things to be proportionate and making them disproportionate makes things worse instead of better.
The second is that the victim, or any future victims, are living in the same household as the perpetrator, and then how do you answer this question: Is the victim now prohibited from having a firearm? You're screwed either way, because if you say no you're denying the innocent victim's right to self-defense but if you say yes the perpetrator now has an excuse to have them in the house.
Then these things combine poorly because the overconfident drunk who wants a gun is willing to bet they can convince anyone it belongs to their sweetheart but the sweetheart is nowhere near as confident they can control what happens if they call the police.
> those are people who have been convicted of a crime and want to commit another one
FWIW, this is why i said "anti-social" and not criminals in my original post. I think with many habitual abusers, the warning signs are there for a long time (often from childhood) before they break the law and before they are convicted.
> "permanently can't own a gun"
This points to other issues with the current system of punishments. OOH you have people claiming prison is meant for rehabilitation and released prisoners are to be considered fully rehabilitated, having paid their debt (which they argue is to society and not the victim) and not longer a threat to society. OTOH you have the reality that many people are repeat offenders and that also some people can genuinely change (or at least maintain the facade of internal change for the rest of their life).
Maybe what we need is a post-prison evaluation to determine which case we're dealing with and whether restrictions (if any) should be temporary or permanent.
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FWIW regarding domestic violence, I think any target of it would be crazy to stay with the aggressor in the same household. People who commit it are often deeply and inherently anti-social without a way to treat them. Instead, as a society, we should be looking for ways to ease the process of their targets separating from them permanently. Case studies of what this kind of abuse looks like should be part of primary education, the abuser should be required to pay for housing for a reasonable period of time so the target can move away, etc.
> FWIW, this is why i said "anti-social" and not criminals in my original post. I think with many habitual abusers, the warning signs are there for a long time (often from childhood) before they break the law and before they are convicted.
But then what are you proposing to do? Tell people they lose a right based on vibes even though they've never been convicted of anything?
> Maybe what we need is a post-prison evaluation to determine which case we're dealing with and whether restrictions (if any) should be temporary or permanent.
Maybe we should reorient prisons into places that actually rehabilitate prisoners and then release the ones that are actually rehabilitated.
> FWIW regarding domestic violence, I think any target of it would be crazy to stay with the aggressor in the same household.
This is one of the things which is hard for the system to tell from the outside. There are legitimate predators with no record because they have the right friends. Then there are alcoholics who are violent drunks and therefore have a record, but haven't had a drink in ten years and then everything seems fine until they have a relapse. Or the exact same thing except that they stay clean and then everything actually is fine.
There are also people who live with an occasionally violent partner because the alternative was their relentlessly violent parents. I find it hard to judge people who have only bad options and then pick one of them.
> the abuser should be required to pay for housing for a reasonable period of time so the target can move away, etc.
The situation commonly happens to begin with because they're both poor and can only stay above water by sharing accommodations. If you want shelters then build shelters; we don't need things that would only work when the perpetrator has enough money to lawyer their way out of it anyway.
It already does. Here is the list of prohibited persons:
convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;
who is a fugitive from justice;
who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act, codified at 21 U.S.C. § 802);
who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution;
who is an illegal alien;
who has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;
who has renounced his or her United States citizenship;
who is subject to a court order restraining the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of the intimate partner;
or
who has been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.
> interpersonal viole ce should prevent you from having a gun
Nitpick but violence is not wrong on its own. Self defense is also violence and should not prevent your from having a gun for next time. Defense of others or reasonable defense of property likewise.
Forcibly removing a person from power who has gained or maintained that power without consent of those he has power over is also violence and even most current states allow us to celebrate it (usually as long as we don't argue it should be repeated against the current government).
It's really that simple, all the inequality, injustice and exploitation that's been happening since the first industrial revolution keeps happening because people who do the work only get paid a fraction of the value they produced and only as long as they keep working while the surplus and ownership goes to people who don't do any work, can be used to make more money which gives them more ownership and is heritable.
BTW, I am really happy whenever I see another person who knows who the luddites really were. The rest are condemned to repeat this shit and we're all worse off because of them.
You do own your work, but you agreed to sell it for a salary. Makes sense, because there is often no tangible "product" you could own otherwise. What should cleaners own?
Co-op businesses seem to not have a problem sharing the profits on less tangible products and services. So I don't see why anyone should retain sole ownership of all profits from a business that they require others to do the work in.
I don't know how co-op businesses work. I think co-ops are hiring cheap third-party cleaners as well. Co-ops also have CEOs making a lot more than the rest of the "cooperative".
> So I don't see why anyone should retain sole ownership of all profits from a business that they require others to do the work in.
Because they are offering, and there are takers? Nobody is forced to work for your business.
This is the root of the fallacy - nobody is forced to work for any particular business but everybody is forced to work for some business since 1) starting a new one is more costly than working for an existing one 2) we'd all end up working for 1-person businesses.
It's the same as people claiming they are sovereign citizens. It's a nice ideal but it doesn't work.
No, the mechanism is clear. What I don't understand is your use of the word fallacy. It is not a fallacy, it is the reality. Being an employee is not an ideal. It is the lived reality for most people.
I've has similar discussions multiple times. Each time it boils down to one of these arguments:
a) "You're not forced to do it, you chose it so it's consensual and therefore right."
b) "The value of your work is determined by how much you managed to negotiate."
The issue with a) is that consent has to be informed and between parties with similar bargaining power, neither is true in an employer-employee relationship. Also choice from a limited set of options where some have large artificial upfront costs is not the same as 100% voluntary free choice.
The issue with b) is that the product (both the output sold to customers and the organization producing the output which can be sold by the owners) have value. This value is independent of the negotiated compensation for work.
Hence, arguments ignoring these issues are fallacious.
Can a 40 year old man have sex with a 12 year old girl if she agrees? What if she's 18? The first is illegal and wrong. The second is legal but most people will tell you it's at least gross. Why? Because of the power differential.
Starting a company takes investment (obviously money but also time spent on administrative tasks, hiring, marketing, etc.). Rich people can just buy companies and get passive income.
Salary negotiations are also unequal - one side has much more information and almost always more time and monetary reserves.[1]
I am tired so i'll cut it short - there's inherent power imbalance in the employer-employee[2] relationship which makes the outcome inherently and unavoidably exploitative.
[0]: They'll often use the word illegal because they have been taught to follow rules but have not been taught about differentiating legality and morality.
[1]: Why do you think you come to the company to the interview instead of them asking to meet you at a restaurant like normal business deals might be discussed? It's so ingrained this is normal that what I said sounds absurd.
[2]: Have you ever thought what those words actually mean? Employees are literally being used, it's right in the name.
There’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem here bc you’re applying asking how to apply cooperative organization theory to a capitalist organization. Presumably in a largely cooperative economy, the cleaner would be a worker-owner of a cleaning organization that provides cleaning labor to the manufacturing organization in question.
They get ownership. The rest is determined from that, since owners collectively decide how much everyone gets paid.
(There might need to be further legal restrictions like minimum wage or tying wage to the skill coefficient used to determine rate of gaining ownership - see my other comments.)
See my other comment. As long as the cleaner cannot fire the CEO, but only the other way around, ownership doesn't mean anything. If you own 0.00001 percent of a company, that gives you about as much power as your vote in a democracy. Probably less so.
Why should the collective owners even have a CEO and why should he have the power to fire people? The only way would be if they collectively decided that. There are other ways to structure the company.
> 0.00001
That's a lot of zeros, must be a huge company and/or a very low skill short-time worker. And a small country if one vote is worth more than that.
Yes, I like my cleaner example. It will be a lot of zeros. Yes, let's end this discussion, I think your views are quite naive and not well thought out.
BTW the company is part of the product. If certain work needs to be done, even if it's low-skill work, it contributes to the function of that company and should give fractional ownership according to amount worked and some coefficient accounting for relative skill.
Who decides who gets hired and fired at that company? How is the coefficient determined? Are we talking about amount of work, or how much your work has contributed to the bottom line of the company?
I don't see that changing anything. As long as there is private property, and you can sell your work for compensation, the rest pretty much follows.
Negotiations, just like salary today, except all sides negotiate with the same leverage.
> As long as there is private property, and you can sell your work for compensation
And that's why I think work should automatically give ownership by law - and therefore decision making power. See, slavery used to be legal too but then enough people decided it's too exploitative, picked up rifles and changed it. Employment is similar, instead of owning a full person, rich people own the entire economic output for 8 hours a day and instead of flogging, they fire workers they don't want. It's less bad but the same principle with more indirection.
> Negotiations, just like salary today, except all sides negotiate with the same leverage.
As the cleaner you don't have the same leverage as the CEO. There would be no change in leverage at all. That's what you don't seem to understand.
As the cleaner, the only leverage would be that you don't need a job. And if you have that kind of leverage, why would you clean at all?
I am all ears for a new system that could actually work, but I don't think it will come from you. You don't seem to be willing to actually think through things.
Hierarchical top-down power structures are only useful when you need to make decisions fast. Pretty much all other times, you can have a vote. As such, I don't see why an individual ("CEO") should have the power to fire workers (or why he should even exist outside emergencies and only have powers needed to avert those emergencies).
Generally, on a team, people know who does good work and who works poorly and drags others or the whole team down. Given that, I can see hiring/firing decisions being made at the team level. If a whole team is seen as underperforming/redundant within the organization as a whole, then the team should be given the choice of either making itself leaner or severing cooperation with the rest of the company. This is still hierarchical but bottom up.
Regarding your last sentence and your general attitude, I think I'll sever our communication here.
IP was the wrong tool for code from the start, it was just convenient to use because it already existed.
What should be protected is human work (it and natural resources are the only things to which humanity ascribes inherent value, all other value is built on top of those).
LLMs are trained on millions of lifetimes of human work while all the income from them goes to the rich at the top. If you don't see an issue with this, not only do you not care about fairness and justice, you also haven't even gamed out in your head what happens 5 or maybe 15 years down the line.
- LLMs are trained without respecting the licenses of the original work, not even giving attribution which almost all OSS licenses require. AGPL required derivative works to be also AGPL - this should include the model and all its output for any reasonable meaning of derived work.
- SOTA models even today produce absolute garbage. A week ago, Claude Sonnet 4.6 tried to call one constructor from the body of another in C# using syntax which doesn't exist. Less glaring issues are completely normalized. This is why "agentic" generation is so popular today - it puts guard rails around the slop.
- I and other devs I've talked to are not interested in the mechanical writing of code but in the additional understanding which comes from engaging deeply with the problem and solution.
It's not about stopping progress, it's about 1) making sure the progress is in the right direction 2) rewarding the people who actually made the progress possible instead of those who have capital.
But of course, feel free to just join the winning side. But then if you don't stand up against injustice today, I won't stand up against it tomorrow when it's happening to you.
I thought I had deja vu when reading your comment so I searched and found that you wrote something very similar 6 years ago, then 4 months ago and then 3 comments within the last month.
Out of curiosity and without meaning it to sound like an accusation, did you write such similar posts by hand or do you use some form of automation for commenting?
It’s funny because someone asked me about this on Twitter too. Specifically, how was I able to reply to tweets of other people with a relevant Twitter thread I had already written.
It’s all manual and I guess just how my brain works. My wife actually calls it “the database” because I can quickly access stories and I apparently tell them in a very similar way.
I’m just as impressed that you noticed and had the Déjà vu.
Out of curiosity, did you come from a family where older generations were storytellers? E.g. parents, extended, or grandparents?
In the sense that there were stories you heard retold (sometimes by the same person) over the years, mutating a bit in each retelling?
I think some brains get wired so that oral (or at least reproductive in some medium) story transmission is effortless, but affinity does seem to differ person-by-person.
if it's a good story, it is worth retelling. my personal approach is to try to link to the old post or at least mention that i told this before. i don't know if that is better or not though. but certainly if the story fits, then it should be posted, and here it fits.
> my personal approach is to try to link to the old post or at least mention that i told this before. i don't know if that is better or not though
I do this on Twitter.
Specifically, I'll retweet the thread or tweet I already have written on the topic.
Retweeting is, IMHO, the best part of twitter as it lets you "weave" a narrative of old tweets and threads. It's also why I think articles are dumb b/c you can't like to the specific part of an article like you can with a tweet thread.
> reply to tweets of other people with a relevant Twitter thread I had already written
I noticed I also have topics I talk about regularly and this would be really nice. Some things only need one high-effort explanation and then linking to that.
Using LLMs would in theory save some effort by rephrasing to it doesn't look copy pasted but I am strongly opposed to the mild reality distortion they are prone to doing (like hallucinating random tidbits which never happened, using "A big part of this" as a rhetorical device instead of an actual quantity, etc.) in addition to flat out lying and other mis-generation (I don't call it hallucinations since this is normal operation, not something exceptional).
> Some things only need one high-effort explanation and then linking to that.
I mentioned in a sibling thread that I do this on Twitter (and it's a lot of fun to get to re-use old threads for new audiences).
> Using LLMs would in theory save some effort by rephrasing to it doesn't look copy pasted but I am strongly opposed to the mild reality distortion they are prone to doing
Same thoughts from me. There is also a bit of "John Henry" [0] in that I want to keep my brain strong in this skill versus letting the machines take it away.
And that's why human work, not its "expression" or some other legalese should be protected by law.
If LLMs (or other "AI" or even AI tools) are able to exactly replicate the behavior of a program (game or otherwise) without access to its source code, that's technologically cool. However, that means it's possible to cheaply replicate immense amounts of human work in a way the law does not cover.
If you take a game and use LLMs to reimplement both its assets and code from scratch but players have the same movement, weapons do the same damage, have the same spread and projectile speed, and so on, then the "new" game is not really new, it's based on other people's work. And nobody should be allowed to profit from other people's work without their consent and without compensating them.
Obviously, work is hard to quantify but that doesn't mean we should give up.
1) Yes but in those cases what their authors are gaining is at best some public recognition, not money. And because the projects don't hide what they're based on, that recognition goes back to the original games and their authors. Now, if they were asking for donations, then yes, I think they should give a part of it to the original devs.
2) We can also look at it from a more utilitarian perspective. When something starts as closed source, people who made it got paid already and the owners (who often did not perform any useful work except putting in money) keep making money from then on. Reimplementing it as open source does not harm the original devs but allows more people to access it and it also often leads to a much more open and pro-social implementation without dark patterns. And the paid version often still has an advantage due to existing awareness, marketing and network effects.
OTOH when something starts as free/open under conditions such as anyone building on top of it has to release under the same conditions, then a company taking that work is violating explicitly stated wishes, is making money which doesn't reach the original devs and does not promote the original work. And it also has the aforementioned advantages. When the closed version eclipses the open one, the owners are free to add dark patterns and otherwise exploit their position further.
This way open work is a global social good, closed work is only good for those who own it.
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I prefer argument 1 because it doesn't require the presence of exploitative power structures.
Either way, we should recognize there are multiple dimensions to compensation - here recognition and money. And work should be rewarded along both axes transitively.
I have the privilege of working for a robotics company small enough that I (a SW dev) can walk a few doors down the hallway and talk to anyone from mechanics, to electronics, to sales, to the people who actually operate the robors on customers' sites. And I have a lot of respect for people who pull a 16 hour shift in freezing cold or with water pouring down their necks.
For the company to function, it requires a lot of people with different skills to come together and each do what they're best at.
As Doctorow says, this is why huge corps segregate people into casts - to keep them from seeing the other's contribution and to keep them hating the other instead of hating those who exploit both.
> As Doctorow says, this is why huge corps segregate people into casts - to keep them from seeing the other's contribution and to keep them hating the other instead of hating those who exploit both.
This is my point. I've grown tired of telling people to hate those who exploit us all when they're tossed crumbs from their master's table and decide that is sufficient to make common cause with him.
I'll shed a tear for the common coder when they can spare a tear for the rest of us.
I always say humans are not smart enough. First they came for the communists... You know the rest but how many of you would pick up a rifle and stand against evil?
Well, first they came for the manual workers and many on HN were happy to help. Now they and their autocompletes came for open source devs, taking our work without consent, credit or respecting the licenses and almost nobody stands up against it. They expect me to pay for me own stolen code and most devs are OK with it because it's not their stolen code and they can get their job slightly faster.
So how long before they come for you? Because by then you will be economically irrelevant and unable to do anything about it.
How far back do you want to go? Programmers have been automating jobs away for a long time. Some historical context:
When Craig Newmark created Craigslist (along with Ebay), it was devastating for the economics of newspapers. Lots of jobs selling classified ads went away, as well as funding for the other jobs.
Wikipedia made other encyclopedias obsolete.
It used to be that you had to do things by mail, by phone, or in person. The websites that we now take for granted probably eliminated lots of jobs processing transactions.
Companies used to have typing pools.
Were these bad improvements? How is it different now?
a) a new technology unrelated to the original job, which made the job redundant - the printing press was not made by watching scribes doing their mechanical movements faster, it was a fundamentally different principle. It was fair competition between independent 2 options, neither of which exploited the other.
In contrast, LLMs cannot exist without programmers first writing immense, astronomical amounts of code as training data.
b) people coming together and making something for free which was paid. Wikipedia is not just subsidized by some corporation which makes money from ads, it is made by people who willingly spend their time to make the world a better place for everyone. And none of them, neither a megacorp stand to become rich from it.
In contrast, LLMs are trained on people's work without their consent, quite offer against explicitly stated wishes. And it's not a common good, it's a for-profit business which ultimately funnels the gains to the top.
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I am not even against LLMs, they are a tool - neither good or bad. I am against how they are created - LLMs trained on AGPL shoud be AGPL and their output should be AGPL. And I am against how they are used - they extract value from people and redirect the reward for work to people who didn't contribute any work.
Fundamentally, people should (collectively) own the product of their work and should negotiate how the reward is distributed on equal footing.
Wikipedia utterly depends on knowledge found elsewhere, often in newspapers or books. They have a "no original research" rule. They didn't get anyone's consent.
If I was given a choice between robust journalism and whatever Craigslist is the choice seems rather plain. A dispassionate analysis of the majority of tech industry "improvements" reveals similar choices.
Attempting to lecture me on what journalism was is a misstep on your part. My first professional development gig was supporting software integrations between 33 local newsrooms, their printing floors, and their (at the time fledgling) online presence. In addition to my normal development work I was frequently called upon to work directly with editorial and newsroom staff on specialty projects and provide on-site support at industry events. As a result I spent a lot of time in the room where shit was going down.
While it's always been possible to find shills in the media landscape the overwhelming majority of the men and women I worked for were the kind of intense scary-obsessive anti-authoritarian types that literally skipped meals and sleep (sometimes days at a time) just for a chance at catching industry or government fucking around. And with literally hundreds of newsrooms scattered across the country staffed similarly journalism was a force to be reconned with. But hey, having to pay $5 to sell your couch to a stranger was kind of a drag so I guess this is better.
If you think that every comment on social media is an "attempt to lecture" you, a random nobody on the internet, who once basically worked as support staff to journalists, you have personal problems beyond my powers to fix...
There are several subtypes of narcissism - overt (=grandiose), covert (=vulnerable), malignant, communal. (Some also use antagonistic as a further subtype of malignant.)
Normally, they are considered separate categories. However, how I like to think about them is a 2D spectrum.
Overt X covert is one axis, malignant X communal is another.
Overt X covert is defined by how the narcissist sees himself/herself:
- Overt thinks they are better than others and feel wronged when they are not treated the way they think they deserve - always respected even if they are wrong, or even admired, worshiped, celebrated. There's this implicit "I am the center of everything / I am the main character" about them. Many people accept this dynamic in order to avoid conflict or simply because they are natural pleasers and end up reinforcing it.
- Covert thinks they are worse than others and feel attacked by the smallest innocent things which threaten to expose some real or perceived weakness of theirs. You either end of walking on eggshells around them or end up triggering them in some ways you don't even recognize until you are their designated enemy.
Malignant X communal is defined by where they get their self-worth from:
- Malignant simply enjoys hurting others - they feed on other people's suffering and feel energized and empowered by getting away with it.
- Communal is driven by being seen as helping. This is not altruism but might look similar at first glance. However, altruism is about actually helping others, communal narcissism is about being perceived that way, that's their end goal. Actually helping is just a method to achieve that and becomes secondary when disagreement/conflict arises. This often happens when you don't show the appreciation they think they deserve.
Every narcissist is somewhere on this 2D spectrum (they are purely one subtype if they are at 0 on the other axis). But very commonly you see combinations like covert+communal and overt+malignant.
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A common misconception is that narcissists think they're better than others. They don't (only overt subtype does). But all narcissists think they are more important than others. They are the center of the world in their mind. This is implicit, they'd never describe it that way because that's what they consider normal. It would be like saying the air around us has transparent color - we don't say that because we consider it so normal to essentially ignore it.
What they do is they implicitly expect to be treated that way. Sometimes they manage to behave in ways which elicit this in others subconsciously. But if you don't, you get various antagonistic reactions depending on the combination of subtypes.
Fleas are behaviors a person picks up by interacting with narcissists too often. In this way, narcissism can be said to be a socially transmissible disease.
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Disclaimer, I am not a psychologist, I have only read about this (and other disorders such as ASPD/psychopathy/sociopathy) extensively. However, that gives me freedom to express my thoughts more openly - a psychologist cannot for "ethical reasons" say certain things such as making value judgements of such people.
I don't have that limitation. I consider it a disease which should for example prevent the person from holding positions of power - the same way psychosis would. The only difference is psychotic people are harmful to both themselves and others and don't hide it, narcissistic people are primarily harmful to others and a re lucid enough to cover it up.
Thank you. It seems a common human experience to me that we’re all updating our inexact-but-useful view of the world. And every now and then I encounter someone who isn’t. Or, someone public who in private is contrastingly reflective compared to their off-putting public representation.
Because people don't have real power, it's all indirect through politicians who are manipulated or paid by professionals.
Democracy should be direct and the gating function shouldn't be age but a test of intelligence, logical reasoning, general knowledge and ability to detect manipulation.
1) Do they really? I honestly don't know, are there independent polls about this?
2) What makes them think they have any right to decide for other people's children? I would be OK with them genuinely thinking they need to surveil their own children but if 1) is true then there is this underlying need of people to control others and I am not OK with that. This is how minorities are suppressed and harassed - same mechanism, different target.
The issue with centrally registering guns is than when you country is taken over by hostile forces (whether an invading army or a democratically elected abuser who turns it into a dictatorship), they know who has the guns and can force those people to surrender them (politely at first, authoritarians always use a salami slicing technique).
The issue with no controls is that even anti-social and mentally ill people can get them.
I wonder if the right middle ground could be:
- Sellers have to do their due diligence - require ID, proof of psychological examination, whatever else is deemed the right balance.
- Not doing due diligence means they get punishment equal to that for any offense committed with that gun.
- They might be required to mark/stamp the gun so that it can be traced back to them or have witnesses for the transfer.
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